Tapjoy And The Move To Hybrid Infrastructure

Over the last year or two there has been a maturing in terms of many people’s vies of how modern infrastructure should look. A few years ago things were very polarized between those who said public cloud should be used for every single workload and those who said that all assets should remain on-premises. Today however organizations are increasingly considering a hybrid approach as more appropriate and safer in terms of single-subject reliance. Recently high-profile Venture Capitalist Brad Feld wrote about what he was seeing for his portfolio companies as they grow and begin to look at a hybrid infrastructure approach.

I got a good reminder of this recently when I took the time to talk with Wes Jossey who heads up Operations at Tapjoy. Tapjoy is a large technology vendor deliver advertizing and analytics for mobile developers. Reaching some 450 million monthly active users, Tapjoy deliver a circle of improvement for mobile developers, helping them serve the right engagement for application users by analyzing how users utilize the applications. Tapjoy then enables developer monetization from application engagement.

Until recently, Tapjoy’s infrastructure was primarily built on Amazon Web Services. They are a big consumer of infrastructure, running some 500 large virtual instances and delivering two million transactions per minute. The company had begun to experiment with running their own infrastructure. They spent some time trialing IBM’s SoftLayer but found it lacking in terms of reliability. They have since moved some of their workload to Equinix and their approach to infrastructure is an interesting look into how one company thinks about technology.

Ignoring the growing trend of taking advantage of services further up the value chain from cloud vendors, Tapjoy hasn’t started using AWS’ big data services such as Redshift or Kinesis. Rather they think of their vendors as simply a low-level compute solution. All of the higher level services that their organization runs on are built in-house and sited on raw compute. This tends to take away from the “move everything non-core to third parties” orthodox view of enterprise IT, but for Tapjoy, the extra work has some benefits. It means that their higher-level solutions are completely customized for their particular use-case and it also means that moving between vendors is a far simpler process than otherwise.

Given the increasing trend towards infrastructure vendors build direct connections to AWS and other public cloud vendors, this compute-only approach brings a couple of benefits. Obviously, as stated above, migration is a far easier task. But also bursting peak workloads off private infrastructure and into the public cloud becomes easier since it is far easier to emulate an application stack that is built on raw compute than one which sits on higher-level, more valuable but more proprietary services.

Of course running raw compute on your own infrastructure is still more complex than running it on a public cloud vendor and in this Tapjoy sought help from private cloud solution provider Metacloud. Using Metacloud’s OpenStack-based service, Tapjoy was able to build its own infrastructure that, it believes, gives it more flexibility and control than it would have seen with other offerings.

Of course it needs to be said that building your own private cloud is a complex and expensive task. Hence there is something of a level of scale below which the economics make this approach impossible. But as Feld pointed out in his post, it doesn’t take a
Netflix- or Facebook like scale until building your own infrastructure becomes price competitive to the public cloud.

When I asked Jossey to opine on where Tapjoy’s infrastructure will end up, he was quick to confirm his view that Tapjoy will likely always have a sizeable AWS footprint. He sees their base load moving to private infrastructure but and bursting loads (something that is a significant issue for mobile vendors like Tapjoy) will be ported to the public cloud.

The open part to take from the Tapjoy story isn’t a dogmatic view that there is one approach that is right for all. Rather different situations, different organization scale, differing propensity to self-manage and differing business drivers will all have their hand in determining which approach best suits any particular customer. For Tapjoy however, the key takeaway seems to be that utilizing raw compute, building ones own value on top of it and running base loads in a private cloud is the best way forward.

I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companie...